Photow00t!

Time to brag a little.

Despite taking hundreds and hundreds of photographs of cars, some of which I'm very proud of, it turns out that the very first photograph I've licensed for commercial use is of a downtown building.

This building, in fact:


Dominion Securities Building, with blurry person.

That photo will appear, in due course, in a fine publication about Canadian Business and the Law - at least, I presume it will, since today they sent me the cheque. Quite by coincidence, as yesterday I emailed the person who solicited it in the first place, finding that her website and email address have since disappeared off the face of the internet.

Now, that's not the first photo I've licensed - in a sense, I've granted various people "licenses" of one sort or another to use my photos in various places, such as NowPublic, Schmap, or in school or university projects. And the first written license was between myself and a company that employs a fairly regular reader of this blog, to use a couple of photos on some promotional literature. Those, I exchanged for a very spiffy iPod.


Some artistic DNA sequences.


Some DNA sequencers, last year.

But today's cheque - well, that seems like some kind of milestone. A sale! A palpable sale!

Now, I just need to shove the guilt aside, and put the fee towards the "get Richard a new DSLR camera" fund, instead of doing something useful with it, like buying retirement savings, or putting it in the kids' education fund, or something.

Sigh.

Photos, and things

Gosh, it's been a long time.

Things have been happening. Not, as Mr. Ollivander says in the first Harry Potter book, "Terrible things, but great", but rather "uninteresting things, but time-consuming".

Ah well.

I break my silence to let you know of a couple of mildly interesting developments on the photographic front... first, I've discovered the self-publishing site Blurb, an add-on service of Flickr (although I guess it stands on its own as well). Although a little pricey, for vanity items or gifts I think it's just about right. I downloaded their rather spiffy BookSmart software, which comes with all kinds of pre-designed but tweakable layouts, and after a bit of faffling around, managed to put some photos from last year's Mosport ALMS race into a rather nice (if I say so myself) little paperback. Which you can see here, should you be so inclined. I never did get its "slurp" feature, which directly ports photos from Flickr into your book, working, but never mind - upload from my own computer worked fine.

Now, don't go all crazy buying the thing, thinking you'll make me rich - you won't. Blurb doesn't allow its authors a profit unless they pay a monthly maintenance fee, as far as I can tell - which is only five bucks, but I honestly can't imagine there's any point. The price per book is steep, too, given that it's only about twenty pages long, but the finished product once ordered was rather nice and glossy, and as a souvenir, well worth it I think. I may do some more, although I can see that putting a large number of photos into printed albums would be an expensive proposition.

In other news, I have been approached, for the first time ever, to provide a photograph for a book. A real, honest-to-goodness book, published by a real, honest-to-goodness publisher. So far, the release has been signed, the fee set, and I'm awaiting a decision by the editorial team as to whether they're actually going to use it or not. In other words, I imagine they're weighing all of the competing photos and making decisions based on style, content, and cost. We'll see, but it's a bit exciting, anyway.

Generally speaking, when people have asked to use my photos for educational projects (for example, the C. elegans photo below), I say yes, and I haven't objected to some of my other photos being used on various websites. Heck, I've even dropped a few into Wikipedia pages that I've authored, like this one about the mighty Akai AX80 synthesizer, or this one about the equally-mighty Sequential Circuits Split-8.


A nematode, circa 1999 I suppose.

The photo below of College Street appeared, with my permission, in Schmap Canada, some kind of interactive guidebook thing that, truth be told, seems kind of lacking in content and confusing to use. It's on this page, somewhere, but I'll be darned if I could have found it without that link having been emailed to me.


College Street, out the office window (more or less)

Even strange Wiki-type news site NowPublic has occasionally asked for, and been granted, permission to use photos in their news stories, at least those stories that didn't offend me at the time.

None of these activities pays, mind you, so the textbook development is a little bit exciting. But I'm just vain enough to enjoy the ego gratification of seeing my photos get used and credited here and there, anyway. Of course, a certain website catering to expensive toys has stolen my car photos before now, as has a somewhat dodgy Toronto news website, and probably many other places I don't know about, but that's the danger of posting the things on Flickr sans watermarks, I suppose.

Back to it, I guess... I spend so much time fiddling around on Flickr these days that this blog might as well become a photoblog of some kind, I think. We'll see. In the meantime, because I know you've all been missing me posting tales of cars and racing, I give you this:


A big smiley Maserati, a few weekends ago

And, as a teaser of a blog post to come, here's a shot from the 2009 Honda Indy Toronto race, an event I last went to nineteen years ago, in 1990.


Scott Dixon, slightly tilted

In the words, then, of Cornelius Fudge, in the fifth Harry Potter book:

"He's back."

In lieu of a real post, again

There is, as usual, not much of interest going on over here these days, so in my usual way I shall deflect your attention from the lack of a literary magnum opus by gratuitously posting some photos. Or, "how I spent my Christmas holiday with the in-laws".

I spent some time taking the usual arty shots of things around the back yard:


It's either Galadriel's mirror, or a birdbath.

A trip down to the waterfront to see the blustery, freezing cold of Lake Ontario:


There were ducks floating in the lake. Crazy birds.

Followed by a jaunt to take some shots of local photogenic correctional facilities, Kingston, Ontario being the undisputed capital of such things in Canada:


Some people call this place Disneyland. It also has a minimum-security farm institution. Yes, a real farm.


My brother once took an astonishing picture of these towers across Portsmouth Olympic Harbour, featuring a sailing ship that had sunk while at dock, using 1600 speed film in broad daylight. It was artistically grainy, to say the least. This place is maximum security and houses at least one notorious serial killer.

And of course there was the traditional Yule log on the fire (said log being purchased in the traditional manner from the grocery store, wrapped in paper and doubtless impregnated with traditional petrochemicals to help it burn):



And some presents, including this one which indicates that at least one person had been listening to me hinting over the previous month or two:


It's a 250 GTO on the cover, in case anyone cares.

Oh, and I've decided that after inhabiting my current office at work for a year, its walls need some decoration. Suggestions, please. Those of you who might actually be feeling helpful and not inclined to suggest "Ozzy Osbourne poster", "collage made of bottle caps", or "multimedia art installation consisting of dried grass, mucilage, doll parts and human dung" might toddle over to Flickr and suggest a few of my photos that would be suitable for framing (if any). I'm just vain enough to put some of them on the wall.

The quest for web domination continues

This photo of mine, taken on the recent cottage weekend:



has made it onto Mark Sisson's Daily Apple, in this post about running barefoot. How exciting! I'm not totally sure about the website - I tend to be a bit suspicious of "health and well-being" operations. But at least they have good taste in feet. They're not mine, by the way - they belong to Junior Ricardipus #2, she of the hilarious joke.

And a comment over at Flickr by Wonderferret, he of the excellent photography and invisible blog, made me remember that a few of my pics have shown up on Matrixsynth, here and here and here. Warning: Matrixsynth is run by people who are seriously obsessive about electronic musical instruments.

And the following two pictures even got used a while ago over at the Science Advisory Board as part of one of their articles about a conference I attended in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was on their ticket, so fair enough.





Just a wee little bit more web presence, and who knows, I might just start to rival Scaryduck for domination of the internet. Or maybe not.